Watch to the end to see us also break the official Guinness World Record's largest chocolate bar! It was way bigger than you would imagine...
Chapter 1: What is the origin of chocolate?
Chocolate is one of the most popular foods on the planet. But did you know it all comes from this weird-looking fruit shaped like a dinosaur egg? In this video, I'll take you from farm to factory to show you how chocolate is made. And at the end, we'll use all the chocolate you'll see in this video to attempt the Guinness World Record for the world's largest chocolate bar.
And it all starts with the cacao tree. This right here is where it all begins. This little flower here will eventually grow into a pod, which will eventually grow into something slightly bigger, then bigger, then even bigger, and then finally into something like this. So yes, technically chocolate does grow on trees.
So now that you have some context on where cacao comes from, I'm gonna introduce you to a really close friend of mine who I call the modern day Willy Wonka. He's a little crazy, but he knows more about chocolate than anyone on this planet. Hey, what's up? Odette! You come to see some cacao? I'm ready for chocolate, baby. Let's go see it.
So these guys have already picked a bunch of pods for us to look at. Oh my gosh! Cacao really kind of does look like a big ice cream cone. The seeds can come right off of the cacao pod like that. This is all gonna be opened up now so they can take the seeds out.
There's no machine. All the chocolate that we eat is harvested by hand.
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Chapter 2: How is cacao harvested?
For the world record that we're gonna attempt later in this video, we need 250,000 cacao pods. So this is just the start. So you can eat this right now. and you suck off all the white pulp on the outside of each seed.
When you don't dry the cacao beans, they're purple inside.
It tastes a little bit like lychee, pineapple, citrusy, kind of almost like a bit of a sour banana sometimes. It's phenomenal. There are two main things you can do with this cacao fruit. You can drink the juice of the cacao fruit. Think of cacao water like coconut water, but 10 times better. And then what's the other thing?
Obviously chocolate. You take the beans, ferment them, grind them, turn them into chocolate. Let's go see how it's made. That's it.
Before we go to the actual chocolate factory, we're at the place where they make the cacao water.
We separate the pulp from the beans. Beans goes to make chocolate, pulp goes to make cacao water. We put it into the cold press machine, getting all the cacao water out.
And that's gonna be the freshest cacao water you'll ever taste? Ever. It looks a little like coconut water. It gives you a little bit of a kick that you get from biting a lemon slice. And it just tastes kind of tropical. Chocolate is bitter, sometimes sour, earthy. This is sweet, fresh, citrusy. But never in a million years would you think that this kind of flavor is associated with chocolate.
If you want to get creative, you can also turn this fruit pulp into cacao fruit leather. You guys know how much I love making fruit leather. or even these chewy cacao fruit snacks which look a lot like ground turkey while they're being made. But now that we've seen how you can use that fruity outer part of the beans, we'll go see how the inside of the bean is used to make chocolate.
We've made it to the chocolate factory, and take a guess at what's in all these different bags around me. If you guessed cacao beans, you'd be right. But these beans can't go inside the factory until they've been fermented and dried. Fermenting the beans is an important step that allows them to develop all of that chocolatey flavor.
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Chapter 3: What happens during the fermentation process?
You can smell their fermentation.
They smell a little bit, yeah, like a little bit like yeasty sourdough bread. Exactly.
What would a chocolate bar taste like if you didn't ferment? Very bland, flat, probably just bitter, boring, nothing like interesting. And then you take this to the drying process.
Once all the cacao is laid out to dry, it just sits here in the hot Ecuadorian sun. And there's so much of it that I can literally make a chocolate snow angel. All these seeds that are drying here, they flip them over every 15 to 30 minutes to make sure that they're constantly being moved and that new ones are in the sun to dry.
And we haven't made chocolate yet, but it's already starting to smell like chocolate. So once the seeds are nice and dry, they're all broken open like this. And on the inside, we get what looks a lot like a dinosaur egg. But if you actually break all of this apart in your hand and crumble it up a little bit, those are cacao nibs. People put them on things like smoothie bowls all the time.
But if you grind these together into a paste, sort of like if you grind peanuts into peanut butter, it makes this sort of chocolate paste, which we're gonna go see now. Welcome to the Hershey's Chocolate Factory. This is about as close as you're ever gonna get to real life Willy Wonka. You can see here that they have this huge hose with perfectly smooth chocolate paste.
But just moments ago, that chocolate paste was in the form of these cacao nibs. So this liquid chocolate paste can literally be turned into anything now. Right? It's like eating a liquid chocolate bar. It is like eating a liquid chocolate bar. I hope you do not like it. Now that we're in the Hershey's Chocolate Factory, I have two goals today. First, I want to see how Hershey's Kisses are made.
Because I've seen some cool videos online and it looks awesome. And second, we need to make some chocolate bars. Now we're in the room where the Hershey's Kisses are made. In front of us is this giant crazy machine that's pumping out Hershey's Kisses.
24 hours a day. There's some debate as to why historically they've been called Kisses. So Milton Hershey developed the Kisses in the early 1900s. Story goes that because of the product kissing the belt, that's how the name was created.
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Chapter 4: How is chocolate made at the factory?
As you see here, we've got the further separation or chicaning of the Kisses so they can go into the infeeds of the wrappers.
When they're just coming off the line, they look so perfect.
That's the goal. So you see the shape of the Kiss, the way that it has that little bit of a bevel on the bottom, and it comes up to a point at the top.
The nice thing is most of the time they end up looking like this when you get it in the package. Sometimes you put it in your pocket, it melts, you ruin your pants. Now that we've inspected all the Hershey's Kisses, they're good to keep moving. From here, they'll start to get diverted to either side to go to one of these wrapping machines.
So as the belt empties out here, this arm comes out to pull more kisses into the infeed. There's tons of Hershey's Kisses and they're all doing the same thing.
Everything is mesmerizing. I appreciate Hershey's Kisses so much more right now.
From here, from this infeed belt, the kisses then are single filed through this chicaning system here so that way they can go individually into the wrapper to have the flag and foil applied and then wrapped. So as the kisses come out of the conveyor, they go down this chute onto then a conveyor belt.
We have that spiral in there so that way we're handling the kisses as delicately as possible so they look as pristine for the consumer as they do when they come off the line.
So they all get sorted by that big machine and then they come here to get individually weighed and measured out.
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Chapter 5: What are Hershey's Kisses and how are they made?
So through this cabinet, the molds go side to side and through vibration, the mold gets shaken and the chocolate distributes throughout the whole mold. So we're trying to get air bubbles out and fill up the whole cavity. So the candy comes out of the shaker cabinet and then it goes into our cooler.
This is me for scale. It's a big fridge. And you can totally see now that they're already cooled off. You know when you've been at home and you have an ice tray that you're trying to get the ice out of and you kind of bend the ice tray on either side to push the ice out? That's what's happening right here with all these chocolate bars. This machine is basically doing exactly that.
So after the mold twisters, the candy goes through the demolding cabinet where the molds are turned upside down and the chocolate is separated from the mold and onto the demolding belt. And then this belt is priming the rows. So that way instead of mold groups, you have them lined out in rows. So how many bars do you make every day?
So across all the lines here at West Hershey, we make about 9 million bars a day. That's more than enough to make a world record.
We gotta quality check these too.
Take that one. Each one of those little blocks is a pip. We're taking a look at it, making sure that they're all there and they all say Hersey.
This looks even more perfect than the pisses. It's shimmering in the light here. I'm looking up close on this thing. I don't think I see anything wrong at all. It passed the shiny test, but let's see if it passes the crack test. Ready? Three, two, one. Oh, yeah. I think these are winners.
All marks of a good temper and a good bar.
We saw the bars downstairs, and then they get lifted up here by this conveyor belt system, and then they're going down this line. Right, here into the infeed. So these lasers are hard at work because every time they see an empty gap between the bars, they speed up the other conveyor belt to catch them up to the bars ahead of them. That's right. That's amazing.
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Chapter 6: How do they ensure quality in chocolate production?
And the thing is also about doing it nice. Not just pouring chocolate all over like a crazy man. You need to start it from the beginning. Look at that, Nick. He's out of the race. Yeah, that's it. Disqualified. Yeah, that's it.
Out of the race. Everyone's yelling at me today. So right now, my oompa and I are lining up all the chocolate so that we can have it ready for them to pipe in that warm chocolate and glue it all together. Oh.
Dennis, have you seen any violations today? Things are going very well right now. What if anybody eat any of the chocolate? You can't eat the chocolate right here.
I'm taking another room. Have you eaten any chocolate?
No.
You're lying. The risk factor for me is very low.
Who? Did you get that on camera? Nick, what happened? The lights went off. One thing we're dealing with during this record is once in a while right now in Ecuador, they're having an issue with the energy grid. And so the lights just shut off sometimes. It should come back on with the generator.
The most important part, though, is the air conditioning because it's 95 degrees outside and it could melt this chocolate. This is bad. It's been five minutes now. They're using flashlights over there right now to keep working on the chocolate bar. I think that's the generator. That sounds good. That sounds good. Oh, it just went off again. This is really not good.
No.
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